Baylor's Art Briles, center, believes his job as a football coach includes guiding his players along the right path if they make mistakes in life.

Photo: Rod Aydelotte, MBO

In that game, Briles' squad didn't use the quick-fast-and-in-a-hurry-up offense.

Instead, he introduced Waller-Ball.

As told in his authorized biography, "Looking Up: My Journey from Tragedy to Triumph," Briles wanted his players to just "waller around on offense," staying on the ground until an official asked if they were OK, so as to milk as much clock as possible.

Picture pigs in mud and waste.

Thirty years later, Baylor University is playing Waller-Ball, except not as a football tactic.

Hopefully, the clock will soon run out on this disgusting game.

ESPN show details other incidents

While the school was determining what to do with the results of a long-awaited and unfortunately much-needed investigation into the athletic department's (mis)handling of rape and assault allegations, ESPN added questions that need to be answered.

The network's "Outside the Lines" program documented more previously unreported incidents involving alleged assaults on women committed by football players, including an alleged victim who says she wasn't interviewed by the law firm Pepper Hamilton, which Baylor hired to investigate itself.

Don't look for Baylor to do the right thing and release the report. Its findings won't be flattering to the Baylor athletic department.

According to various media reports, the number of women who have reported to police or school officials that they were raped or otherwise assaulted by Baylor football players since Briles became the head coach in 2008, is in the double digits.

That such allegations can be charted like fumbles and interceptions is in and of itself astonishing.

But there are multiple claims Briles and Baylor president Ken Starr knew of accusations but did not take appropriate measures to discipline the players - some received no reported team or school punishment - or protect other students from potential danger.

That is inexcusable.

Briles is not responsible for the criminal behavior of his players.

It is law enforcement's job to enforce the law.

But the coach is responsible for how the university treats his players - when and for what those players are disciplined, and which players deserve to represent the school on scholarships - on the football field.

Baylor's athletic department is being accused of establishing an atmosphere in which students believed football players could get away with attacking female students.

How sad and disgusting, particularly for a university that proudly waves a religious banner that is supposed to separate it from so many other heathen institutions.

This is not the price a school must pay to win football games.

And ignorance is no excuse when a football program faces this many horrific accusations.

Elliot, Ukwuachu convicted

"Deliberately indifferent" is the phrase Jasmin Hernandez uses in her lawsuit against the university and Briles.

In January 2014, defensive end Tevin Elliot was convicted of sexually assaulting Hernandez and sentenced to the maximum of 20 years in prison.

Two other Baylor students testified at his trial that Elliot also raped them, including two weeks before the incident for which he was convicted, and prosecutors produced evidence of a fourth victim.

Last August, Sam Ukwuachu, another Baylor defensive end, was convicted of rape. (The Pearland High School graduate claims he is innocent and is out on an appeal bond.)

Baylor's Title IX investigation into the 2013 incident was so inadequate the trial judge would not allow it into the record.

In April, Shawn Oakman, an All-Big 12 defensive end prepping for the NFL draft, was arrested for an alleged sexual assault at his Waco apartment.

There are too many other football-related incidents to list in this space, andthe near certainty of more unreported ones, considering the repeated refrain from accusers that the school's response tended to blatantly favor athletes over students.

Time for coach to think differently

Something stinks in Waco - and we're not talking about the funky tap water for which the town used to be known.

It is difficult to imagine Briles - a man with daughters and a man of faith - would be so callous as to put winning above all else.

But this almost-epidemic situation is past the "what did he know and when did he know it?" stage of presumptive innocence.

Briles, having taken the Bears from the bottom to the top of the Big 12 Conference, is immensely popular in Waco.

Before he showed up on campus eight years ago, Baylor had not had a winning season in a dozen years of Big 12 football.

He is an outstanding football coach. He cares about his players.

Perhaps too much. Perhaps he is too forgiving.

There is a chapter titled "Kid-Saving Business" in Briles' autobiography "Beating Goliath: My Story of Football and Faith," which was released a few months after Elliot's conviction.

In it, Briles vows to always stand up for his players, even after they make poor choices and mistakes.

"I view a significant part of our job as coaches as being in the kid-saving business," Briles wrote. "We run into a lot of young men with a lot of different pressures, from a lot of different backgrounds, and with a lot of different academic experiences by the time they get to us. It's our job to fight for them when they make a bad choice or when they think they don't have a lot of hope.

"If they do falter or make a mistake, then we need to give them a chance to get back on the right path. If we don't, then we know what's going to happen.

"If you want examples of people in elected positions making bad choices, we could go to the national, regional and local levels. So are we really going to condemn somebody who's nineteen years old for making a bad choice? It doesn't make whatever they did correct. At the same time, we need to help guide them through those mistakes to where they have a chance to be successful. That's the way I've always felt and I'll never think differently."

It is beyond time for him to start thinking differently.

Red flags raised

ESPN reported that several months before the crime for which Elliot is serving two decades in prison, Baylor judicial affairs officials were made aware of a sexual-assault citation against him.

A community college student said he "trapped her in her room, held her against her will and touched her inappropriately, at one point poking a broom toward her vagina."

Elliot told ESPN his coaches never mentioned the situation to him.

"I don't even know if they knew," he said. "I just kept playing ball, kept going to school."

Maybe nobody in the Baylor football program knew about Elliot's case.

Maybe those running the football program decided to just Waller-Ball around in the mud and waste.

Jerome grew up in downtown Acres Homes, Texas. He is a proud graduate of Mabel B. Wesley Elementary and was a basketball team captain at Waltrip High School, where he helped the Mighty Rams to a near-.500 record.

A math genius and engineering major in college, he's still working on this writing thing. He says that the three years he spent as an F.M. Black Panther probably played a more significant a role in the man he would become than the time he spent in college.

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